As on March 2, 2013, NPS had a corpus of over Rs 28,400 crore (Rs 284 billion) of 44.93 lakh (Rs 4.49 million) subscribers.

Around 200,000 subscribers are from the private sector while 27 lakh (Rs 2.7 million) are from central/state

governments.

Around 15.79 lakh (1.57 million) subscribers are served by NPS-Lite, which is designed to ensure ultra-low administrative and transactional costs.

New Pension System, based on defined contributions, is an initiative of PFRDA, the apex body established by Government of India to regulate and develop the pension sector in the country.

On the debt securities front, the regulator said that securities selected for investments should have a minimum residual maturity period of three years from the date of investment by the pension fund manager.

In terms of industry exposure of pension fund manager, PFRDA said it should be restricted to 15 per cent of NPS investments taken together under all NPS schemes.

The pension regulator said that investments in equity should be restricted to 5 per cent (sponsor group companies) and 10 per cent (non-sponsor group companies) of the market value of company's paid up equity capital.

On rated asset backed securities, PFRDA said these will be eligible securities for investments under 'Asset Class-C' provided they have a residual maturity of not less than three years and have an investment grade rating from at least two rating agencies.